The Machine Stops is a science fiction short story that depicts a future world in which most of humanity has been driven from the surface of the earth and lives underground, each person in an isolated standard room. All physical and spiritual needs are provided by an all-powerful global Machine.  People spend their time sharing ideas by means of video conferencing and instant messaging. The story centers on two characters who live on opposite sides of the world: Vashti, a woman content with the status quo, and her son, Kuno, a rebel who convinces her to travel to his room. There he confesses that he is disenchanted with the sterile underground world and that has visited the surface and discovered others living outside the Machine, only to be recaptured and threatened with expulsion and probable death through “Homelessness”. In the meantime, Technopoly, a kind of Machine worship religion, is re-established, and the life support needed to visit the outer world is abolished. The Mending Apparatus, which repairs defects in the Machine, also fails, but is disregarded as a whim of the omnipotent Machine. Since knowledge of how to repair the Machine has been lost, the situation continues to deteriorate until civilization collapses.  

The story initially appeared in the November 1909 issue of The Oxford and Cambridge Review and was included in Forster's 1928 collection The Eternal Moment and Other Stories.  It has been voted one of the best novellas of all time and was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two in 1973.

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